Editing | Development

When we started to edit our documentary, the first thing we did was put the clips into bins to help us navigate the footage and to make it easier for us.

Before Re-Shoot Day

• We started by putting together all of the clips we had, and all of the clips we wanted to use, in order to see how long it would be without cutting the clips. This came to a very long duration, which we understood as there was a lot of dialogue and clips that we didn't need.
• We then proceeded to cut the parts of the interview that we didn't need.
• This was quite a long process as we kept going back and deleting more and more parts of the interview that we decided didn't need to be there.
• We got a few other people to watch our edit as we wanted their opinion on what should be cut and what she be left in.
• This helped us a lot as we needed a fresh pair of eyes and ears due to all three of us watching it too many times.
• Once we had edited the clips together, we focused on the sound. We decided that the sound on the H4 recordings - which was John's audio - wasn't very good and we should re-shoot to get better audio. However the clip mic on Carol did sound usable, so we cut around her dialogue so we knew what parts we were keeping.
• We then decided that we would re-film in different locations so we took out the clips that we were going to re-shoot so we could replace them once they were filmed.
• We also added a few cutaways of the birds so we knew, roughly, where they would go.

After Re-Shoot Day

• We added the footage that we needed into the empty slots we created before hand.
• Doing this saved us a lot of time as we didn't need to change the order of everything too much, and also we were much more prepared.
• We put some more cutaways of the birds and the actuality shots into the timeline to give the documentary some life, and we also added the audio clips that we wanted to use for the interviews.
• Myself and Nisserin decided to start looking at graphics for our opening title, and we came up with the idea of grass as our text. With some work on Photoshop, we produced an effective title which we really liked. We put it over the top of a panning shot of the farm, and added some music and created our opening sequence.
• We made up another one with a duck as we weren't sure which one we preferred. We showed Sammi both of them and she really liked the first one, so we decided to stick with that.

After Sync Assembly Viewing

• After getting Helens feedback, we went back to our edit and made some of the changes she wanted us to make. We started by writing more commentary for the opening sequence and the several other sequences in the documentary. We then shortened the opening sequence and wrote Carol's introduction as commentary.
• We moved some of the cutaway shots around so they would fit in better and also to make the video run smoother.
• We made the interview shots tighter, and got rid of the questions which made the video seem more like a documentary. We sped up the NFU segment by getting rid of one of the farmer quotes, and by placing the other two on one shot to make the pace quicker.

After Fine Cut Viewing

• After getting Helens feedback, we went back to the edit to make the last few changes.
• We made the landscape shot in the opening title sequence static, we added an atmosphere track of birds to make the location come to life and to make it more realistic and pleasing to watch.
• We cleaned up the cuts, an adjusted the volume levels of the audio to make sure they all sounded the same.
• We then moved on to colour correcting. To do this, we picked one clip that we liked the colour and the brightness of and we tried to match all the other clips to that one. There were quite a lot of shots that were different colours, but we tried to match it as best as we could by using the three-way colour correcting tool.

Once we were happy with our edit, we watched it on full screen and pointed out a few small changes that needed to be made to make it better. Once those changes were made, and we were happy with the final outcome, we had finished our edit.